


legacy

by apricots



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Kylo Ren Backstory, Psychological Horror, Suffering, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-10 07:32:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5576803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apricots/pseuds/apricots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren / Ben Solo backstory fic.<br/>Ben is born with intense Force sensitivity that manifests as a kind of empathy curse; he can feel, all at once, every painful or upsetting thing that has ever happened to everyone in his vicinity.</p><p>2/2 birthday presents for B.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. weakness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mlraven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mlraven/gifts).



> HAPPY BIRTHDAY B!!!!! AGAIN!!!! I KNOW YOU HATE HIM BUT I WROTE THIS FOR YOU ANYWAY I LOVE YOU

When he was a baby, he cried almost constantly, screaming and thrashing. No one could calm him, no matter how hard they tried; not even Luke. He did not laugh or smile. After a week of near-constant screaming, Leia brought him back to the hospital. Luke insisted that he sensed no sickness in the boy, but Leia could feel something was wrong.

They ran tests, and what they came back to her with was, “A brain scan revealed that there is an issue with his pain receptors.”

“An issue?” Leia held the baby close to her chest; he thrashed in her arms, screaming. “What does that mean?”

“We cannot determine any reason for it,” said the doctor, “But your son is experiencing a considerable amount of pain, all the time.”

They sent her home with sedatives, telling her that there wasn't much else they could do. There was nothing causing the pain, as far as they could tell, so how could they make it stop? The first night he slept through, Leia couldn't sleep at all. She sat, fingers steepled, and watched her son through the night.

 

His family's legacy was never anything but a curse. A cruel joke. Vader was callous and detached in a way not many ever are; cosmic rebalancing gave Ben an overabundance of empathy. What took many Jedi years to master, he was born with. The Force connected him to every person near him, and forced him to feel their suffering-- and only their suffering. He felt it all at once, without any filter. His earliest memories were not his own; they were blurs of motion and chaos, screams echoing in his ears, overwhelming grief. He felt every wound, every loss, every heartbreak, of everyone who was ever in the same building as him. The more people that were nearby, the louder the cacophany of misery became. It was not comprehensible or ordered; individual events, feelings, or people were impossible to pick apart from the flood. The physical pain was all he ever knew; he felt hundreds of lifetimes' worth of wounds, all at once, all the time.

His first word was an agonized _no_ , drawn out, a terrible scream; an echo of one of the few things that was sharp and clear through the chaos. Luke's voice, desperate and ragged, barely even a word.

Faced with grief too incredible for even an adult to comprehend, what can a child do but scream? As soon as he was old enough to move on his own, the fits of violence started. He would very suddenly scream and sob and break things, hit people, bite and kick and thrash. Furniture shifted, small items flew off shelves and smashed against the floor, the walls shook. His parents would ask him what was wrong, but he didn't have the words to explain. He never knew anything else.

Han said that it was pointless to keep giving him toys; everything they gave him eventually got broken, smashed, torn to pieces, thrown into a pit. Leia ignored him, and instead made sure they gave him soft toys that couldn't hurt him when he tore them apart.

It wasn't that he wanted to hurt anyone. He just wanted it to stop. The catharsis of breaking things, the momentary release of energy when he smashed something into a thousand pieces-- even just a second of relief felt worth it. And when you're a child, it's difficult to think past instant gratification.

When people got close to him, the screaming got louder, the memories sharper; he didn't have the words _don't touch me,_ so he lashed out until they backed away. They learned quickly that trying to touch him to calm him down when he was having _an_ _episode_ (as they took to calling it) only made things worse.

 

“The Force is strong with him,” Luke said. They didn't need to lower their voices to hide their conversation from Ben-- he could only just barely hear anything in the present over the constant roar in his head-- but they didn't know that, so they whispered.

“ _The Force_ is torturing him,” Han hissed back. Luke's ice blue eyes drifted over to Ben, and Leia's eyes followed. He sat in the corner, small and pale and always trembling, fiddling with his latest soft toy. “This is your thing, Skywalker. Fix it.”

Luke shook his head. “It isn't something to be fixed, but rather something to be mastered. He has a powerful gift, the ability to truly and fully understand the suffering of other beings. If he--”

“But he doesn't _understand_ it, he's just a child!” Leia snapped. Luke looked at her, patient and still; a Jedi, and not her brother. “Luke, please, how can we help him?”

He patted her cheek and smiled softly. “I'll think of something,” he said.

 

Luke spent hours watching him, carefully keeping his distance half the time and spending the other half trying to coax Ben into communicating. Ben didn't talk much, and most of the time, he couldn't hear anyone when they spoke to him. Even Han and Leia found themselves unsettled by the way he would stare off into space at nothing-- his wide dark eyes glassy and unfocused, not looking at them, seeing things he shouldn't be able to see.

“He's very lost,” Luke said to Leia, rubbing small circles in the middle of her back. “He doesn't know how to exist in the present. He gets washed away by the memories, and there's nothing to ground him in the present moment.”

“What an awful way to live,” she murmured.

“Somewhere with less people, I think, would be easier for him,” Luke suggested, and so they moved. A small house on the outskirts of town where hardly anyone lived; close enough that they could still go to work on the Resistance base, but far enough away that maybe it wouldn't hurt Ben any more.

Ben calmed, a bit, but of course he could never be normal. He smiled, sometimes, though-- he'd never done that before. He would toddle off into the grassy field, sit down, and hum to himself, quiet tunes they'd never heard before. He liked to draw-- the first thing he'd ever really seemed to _like._ He drew for hours, scribbling constantly. Luke found special drawing tools for him, in a hundred colors-- so strong not even Ben's worst tantrums could break them.

 

“Hey, champ,” Han said, sitting down with his legs sprawled in front of him. The sun was bright and warm, like it was every day; he was getting a tan, but little Ben just burned. He didn't seem to notice, but Leia insisted on draping a lightweight cloak over him to protect his delicate skin.

Ben was hunched over on his hands and knees, in the middle of a mess of colorsticks and paper, frowning at his drawing. When he was focused-- which was rare-- the intensity in his tiny four-year-old eyes was surprising and strange.

“What's eating you, little buddy?” Han asked. They didn't usually get to look at his drawings, since Ben would usually finish them, then get upset and tear them up. Sometimes he would get especially distressed, and the drawings would catch fire, and Leia would swoop in and snatch Ben away before he could get hurt while Han dumped water on the flames. Neither of them told Luke about those times.

But this time, when he finished the drawing, Ben dropped the colorstick on the ground and held up the piece of paper in both hands, showing it to Han. “Wow,” Han said. Ben stared at him over the drawing, sort of expectantly. Han reached out, moving slowly, and gently took the paper from him so he could look at it properly before Ben decided to destroy it.

It was a bit difficult to make out, given that Ben was four years old and his hands shook constantly, but it got the point across. A large black rectangle with a face drawn on it, next to a blobby brown thing that could only be Jabba the Hutt. Since that part was Jabba, the other thing had to be him, frozen in carbonite-- Han glanced up at Ben, who was still staring at him, and pointed to the black rectangle. “Is this, uh, me?”

Ben nodded. Han glanced down at the drawing. Poor kid. The carbonite hurt like a bitch-- Ben shrieked, sharply, interrupting his train of thought. Han jumped, startled into dropping the drawing; Ben's eyes were glassy again, his face scrunched up, tears welling in his eyes.

“Oh, shit-- uh--” He instinctively reached out to touch him, but then remembered that was a no-no and jerked his hands back. “Ahhh, okay, it's okay-- Ben, kiddo, I'm fine now. See? Your mom rescued me, and it all turned out okay.”

Ben stared up at him, blinking slowly until his vision seemed to focus on Han's face. He smiled awkwardly down at the kid, and said again, “I'm okay now.”

Ben's eyes flicked from the drawing to Han's hands, frozen in front of him. “Okay?” Han prompted. Ben wiped at his eyes with the palms of his hands and nodded. He took a deep shaky breath, then exhaled, and picked up another colorstick.

 

Leia was less enchanted by _sometimes_ and _a bit_ and _maybe--_ Ben was still violent, erratic, sobbing and screaming for hours, still unable to sleep without sedatives to ward off the nightmares, still rarely spoke. It was just... a little bit better. She could never be satisfied with half-solutions; putting a bandaid on a gushing wound wasn't really her style.

“I don't like the idea of Luke poking around in his brain,” Han muttered.

“It's the only thing that could possibly help,” she said firmly, and that was the last word on the subject.

Ben never liked Luke-- not that he liked anyone, small and strange and angry as he was. He especially didn't like Luke, it seemed like. He would glare mutinously up at him every time Luke tried to talk to him, and the first few times Luke hovered his hand over his head to try to see what was going on in there, Ben shoved him away so hard he fell over.

“Well,” Luke said, “He seems to be figuring out a few things all on his own.”

Through Luke, Ben had to feel the echoes of Vader, lightning flashing through swirls of darkness, and he hated that. He hated it even more than the smoldering remains of his childhood home on Tatooine, the corpses wrapped in rough linen, his hand cut off with a lightsaber-- Vader was the worst of it. Feeling the shadow of Vader's suffering through Luke-- even just the small piece Luke had, even just the echo of an echo-- was terrifying.

But he liked R2-D2. Ben would sit with R2-D2 for hours, beeping and cooing. Droids had no pain to feel, no suffering to take on. It was simple, and easy, and it wasn't painful. There were very few times in Ben's life when he wasn't in pain; when he went out as far as he was allowed into the field and sat with R2, the pain was distant, and he could ignore it, and he would play tag with the droid and always win because an astromech really can't roll very fast on a grassy hill.

“Just leave him be,” Han said, perched on a chair close to the house. He tinkered with bits of the Falcon while Ben ran around. Luke stood, his cloak brushing the ground, arms crossed over his chest; a long white pillar of Jedi, staring at Ben with an intense focus. Ben got that focus from the Skywalker side of his family, there was no doubt. If Han had to guess, he'd say Vader probably had that exact same sharpness in his eyes. If he even had eyes under that mask.

Luke glanced down at him, eyebrows raised, and said, “I haven't said anything.”

“You were plannin' on it,” Han muttered.

“I still haven't had even one conversation with him. It seems like it would be good to try while he's happy, instead of while he's more miserable,” Luke said mildly. “Don't you think?”

“You'll ruin his mood.” Every time Luke came by, inevitably a veritable stack of frantic scribbled drawings of Darth Vader showed up, scattered around the house, in various stages of torn and burned and crumpled. It didn't take a genius to figure out why.

“I will do my best not to.”

There was never really any arguing with Luke, not when he was in problem-solving Jedi mode, so Han shrugged and made a quiet grumbling noise while Luke strode off across the yard.

 

“Hi there, Ben,” Luke said, crouching in front of him. Ben was back to drawing and beeping quietly at R2. “Hey, Artoo. You two getting along?”

Ben glared at him, but at least that meant he wasn't lost somewhere off in the past. Luke smiled, and Ben just kept scowling. His hands shook, then twitched, then picked up the black colorstick and started scrawling over the drawing of R2 he'd been working on. He didn't look down at the paper, kept his eyes fixed on Luke, like his hands were moving on their own.

It was always a little difficult to breathe around Ben; the Force was always disrupted around him, not flowing evenly the way it was supposed to. He couldn't control it, so it shuddered, rushed, twisted. It was obvious Leia and Han were afraid that Ben was a thing of the Dark Side, but the reality was as far from that as possible. He was a child; his experience of the Force was completely pure, balancing right down the middle. It wasn't light or dark, but it was intensely concentrated.

Honestly, Luke hadn't the faintest idea what to do with him. Especially since he was so small and barely spoke-- how could he teach someone he couldn't even talk to? He was pretty sure that if he could talk to Ben, he could help him figure out how to focus his powers, but Ben didn't talk. Not to him, anyway, which was the part that mattered most.

“I'm going to try to do that thing you hate again,” Luke said, reaching out his good hand. “Can you try to let me in this time? I think I might have hurt you a bit last time, but it won't this time.”

Ben kept staring at him, still scribbling on the paper-- Luke glanced down to see a massive Vader's mask almost completely blotting out the picture of R2. Ben followed his eyes and looked down, then froze, eyes very wide. He hadn't been doing it on purpose. Hadn't even realized he was doing it.

He started to cry, and that gave Luke a perfect idea for how to get in his good graces. It might not work, and it was definitely frivolous-- if any other Jedi were still alive, they certainly wouldn't approve-- but he was sure it would help. “Hey, it's okay,” he said, and held his hand over the paper. Just the black parts, just the Vader mask. He closed his eyes and slowly, carefully, lifted the black color up, leaving the white and blue and grey behind. Ben stopped crying. Luke dropped the black wax onto the ground next to the paper and opened his eyes. Some of the drawing had been picked up, too, but it was mostly intact, and Ben was staring at him like-- well, like how normal kids stared at him when he did stuff like this, like he was the most incredible thing they'd ever seen in their lives.

“It's a very nice drawing,” Luke said, and gently took the black colorstick out of his hand. Ben trailed his fingers over the drawing, then looked up at him and made the same beeping and cooing noises that R2 did whenever it introduced itself.

“Will you let me in now?”

Ben chewed on his lower lip and didn't say anything, but this time when Luke put his hand near his head and reached out, he wasn't violently pushed away. Instead, he was immediately bombarded with overwhelming sensory input-- the smell of smoke, the sound of screams and mechanical whirring, flashes of blaster fire and explosions, the same deep pit in his stomach he felt the day his family's home was burned to the ground, and then sharp pain shot through his veins, every inch of his body.

He recoiled, his eyes snapped open, and he snatched his hand away-- Ben just blinked slowly at him, head tilted to the side, confused. It took a minute for Luke to catch his breath, because apparently he hadn't been breathing, and he combed both his hands through his hair. Then he squared his shoulders and tried again.

 

“So,” Luke said. “Basically, he can come live with me, and I can train him to control his powers-- I really need to be with him all the time for that to work-- or he can stay here. But if he never learns to control this, he won't be able to live around other people. Ever. And he'll only get worse, I can see that much. Pain makes people angry.”

“No,” Han said flatly. “He's staying with us--”

“Han,” Leia put her hand on his shoulder, frowned-- “He--”

“ _No_ , Leia,” He brushed off her hand and rounded on her, scowling. “He can't leave, he can barely _talk._ He's _five._ ”

“He needs to be trained,” she said, but she knew he was going to win this one. He could be intolerably stubborn when he wanted to be.

“He's our son, and he'll stay with us,” Han snapped.

In the yard, Ben started screaming, and the conversation had to be over.

 

Ben got better and he got worse. Better: he learned to speak, could hold entire conversations with his parents and with Luke. He didn't cry as much, and he took his pills every night and slept the whole way through. Worse: after the constant crying stopped, his fits of anger became longer and more brutal. As he got older, his grasp of the Force extended beyond moving small objects, but his control didn't improve. It actually got worse; he became capable of more things, but he had no idea what to do with any of it.

The day ships came crashing into the base, smoking and broken, he could feel it-- they should have been far enough away that he couldn't, because they had always been far enough away, but they weren't any more. He woke up at six in the morning, nine years old, blood running down his head, smoke filling his lungs, his ship's engine screaming as he tried to lower it carefully down-- his shoulder bleeding-- cold creeping up his legs-- his co-pilot too still and too quiet--

He fell out of bed, clutching his head and screaming. He couldn't breath with all the smoke, with the shrapnel in his lungs, with his gloved hand closed around his neck _his own father gleaming behind the mask_ \--

Of course his parents came running in, and he felt Alderaan explode, and he felt the carbonite encase his limbs, and the gunshot wounds peppering his body, every scar an open wound, and he cringed away from them.

The hand on his shoulder burned.

“ _Don't touch me!_ ” he screamed, throwing out a hand. He couldn't see his room any more-- it was dark and cold on the inside of this cell, alone in space, in the medbay dying-- and he couldn't hear anything until the startled shriek snapped him back to reality.

His room was on fire. His mother was on fire. He stared, frozen, screams echoing in his head. He couldn't move to help, he just stood there, staring, as the sprinkler on his ceiling soaked everything he owned and ruined all his things.

 

“I'm sorry,” he said, for the hundredth time, desperation making his voice ragged. “Please, mom, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to-- I don't even know what happened, I couldn't see anything, it was so dark--”

“I know, sweetheart,” she said patiently, but she didn't know. He could feel her fear radiating off her in waves. His father paced back and forth, scowling at the communication screen on the wall.

“Please don't call Uncle Luke, please, mom--” He twisted his cloak around his hands anxiously, shoulders shaking more than usual, and his eyes darted anxiously between his two parents. Han was anxious, too. If they were calling Luke, it could only be to send him away. He hadn't left this house since he was a toddler, since he had to be out with the crowds of people. He couldn't think of leaving. He couldn't leave. This was his home.

“Please don't send me away,” he whispered. He felt tears sting his eyes and hurriedly wiped them away. He'd never messed up this badly before. He'd never _hurt_ anyone, not really, except for maybe that time he bit Uncle Luke, but he was fine, really-- he'd never hurt anyone like this before. His mother's wrist was badly burned. He couldn't remember doing it, but he knew he had, but he didn't know how-- he didn't know, he didn't do it on purpose.

“Nobody's getting sent away,” Han snapped, voice sharp and impatient-- Ben choked on blood as a blaster hit him square in the chest, sharp and impatient was never a good thing. He jerked back, clutching his chest, breathing ragged.

The look Leia gave Han said everything he needed to know. They were sending him away. “I don't want to leave,” he said, voice cracking, hands twisting in the fabric of his shirt. “I--”

She stared straight ahead, back stiff, jaw clenched shut, and they could torture her as much as they want but she wouldn't say a damn word-- pain coursed through her body as the needle slid out of her wrist and she bit back a scream--

The carbonite burned-- sand stung his face-- it only got worse the more upset he got and he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to take deep breaths. It was hard to take deep breaths when all he could taste is blood and smoke and his lungs were being turned to stone. He told Uncle Luke that a thousand times, but Luke would just tell him to _focus,_ to _trust the Force_ , to _relax._

“It's okay, kid.” His father's voice was distant, and he flattened against the wall, wheezing, blinking furiously to try to get back to whatever it was that was happening right now. The desert. Vader's ship. The Falcon. His living room. Jabba's palace. Hoth.

He almost had it-- he grabbed onto the living room and dug his fingers into the wall (he didn't feel or hear the wall crack) and he was pulling himself back, figuring it out, fighting through whatever they injected him with, fighting through the blaster wounds-- and then his father put his hand on his shoulder and it shattered. He spun out, grip on the present lost, spinning through familiar fragments of suffering.

He collapsed, digging his fingernails into his skin, knees hitting cold metal, burning hot sand, fifteen feet of snow. Millions of voices cried out in terror-- it wasn't quick enough, they were in pain before they died, all of them, and they felt the planet rip apart under their feet before there was nothing. “Damn smuggler,” someone spat, and kicked him hard in the chest.

When he finally clawed his way back to the living room, shaking and bleeding (not actually bleeding), there was just more shouting waiting for him.

His mother: “Luke can help him! We should have done this years ago!”

His father: “We can't send him away!”

His mother again: “I don't _want_ to do this, Han, any more than you do, but it's clear by now that he's not getting better on his own, he needs a teacher! He could have burned the house down! A year ago he could barely move a book, and today he snapped his entire bedframe in half!”

He broke his bed? He couldn't remember. “I'm sorry,” he said again, staring at the shiny wood floor, at the gouges he clawed into it. He could feel the wood under his nails, now. He couldn't control it, none of it, not any more. The smoke from the engines of the X-Wings still clung to the back of his throat.

“Leia, he's our _son._ ”

“He's our son, and I can't let him hurt himself, and he's _going_ to hurt himself-- he could have died if we weren't there, he could have burned the house down with him still inside-- he won't be gone forever, it's not like we can't see him--”

“Please don't,” he whispered, but his voice was hoarse from screaming, and maybe they couldn't hear him. “I don't want to leave.”

The communicator crackled. “Han? Leia? What happened?”

Uncle Luke finally picked up. They were going to send him away, his mom was winning this fight, he could feel it-- he inhaled sharply and suddenly felt a new kind of sharpness, a different sort of vision, one that hadn't happened yet. The hum of a lightsaber, glowing red against the snow. A glimmering black mask. Boots thunking loudly on the floor of the ship.

“Please don't,” He tried to say it louder, so they would understand the urgency. He had a bad feeling about this, a terrible feeling, but it wasn't the same as other bad feelings. “Please, mom-- dad-- don't--”

 

They sent him away. Han kissed him on the head before he stormed out and slammed the door behind him; Luke kept his hand firmly on Ben's shoulder, to stop him from running away. Leia cried as she packed his bag for him, put in his drawing book and his favorite blanket, but she was still sending him away.

“It'll be okay,” Luke said, more to Leia than to Ben. She wiped her eyes and smiled at Ben, put her hands on his cheeks.

“Mom, please,” he said again. “I don't want to be a Jedi, I'm scared--”

“I'll see you soon, sweetheart,” she said. “I'll come visit, as soon as I can, okay?”

Luke's hand on his shoulder tightened as he moved to try to run back to his room, and his entire body locked up. “Sorry, kid,” Luke said, picking him up. He couldn't move at all. “This is really the best option. I promise.”

He couldn't break free until he was already on the ship, and by then it was too late; he screamed, peeled sheets of metal off the walls, smashed himself against the door, but the ship took off and he couldn't do anything to stop it. Of course he couldn't do anything the one time he really wanted to.

He curled himself into the corner, hugging his knees to his chest. His parents were gone, too far away to feel any more, leaving him alone with Luke and the cold of space.

Not quite alone. He tried to ignore it, the familiar encroaching darkness, the shadow, but it came nonetheless. A deep ragged breath, heavy boots on the floor, the creak of leather. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that didn't help much. Vader was there regardless, his shadow long, his presence cold.

Sand stung his face, and someone shouted at him in Huttese, and he trailed his hand over the hot metal of his first podracer.

 


	2. strength

“I know being around kids your age will be new and scary, but I think it will be good for you,” Luke said, resting his hand on Ben's shoulder. The metal one. Sharp burning pain sliced through his wrist, cutting off his hand and cauterizing the wound at the same time. Ben stared straight ahead, gripping his wrist. He tried not to look at the phantom Vader that stood on his other side, breathing and staring and glimmering. He was cold. They were on the ground, and Ben could feel the distant echoes of more people just out of his reach, but he was still as cold as he was in space. Vader emanated cold like a huge block of ice.

He shivered and pulled his cloak around him, curled his fingers in the familiar fabric. He tried to think of something to say-- something to convince Luke to take him home-- but it was all too slippery. Everything he thought was raspy and ragged and not his; _join me, Luke,_ and _you have failed me for the last time,_ and _you do not know the power of the Dark Side._ He looked nervously up at the phantom, and the phantom put his hand on his other shoulder. It was heavy and cold and uncomfortably real; he flinched away, and stumbled forward out of the ship and onto the planet, clutching his bag that his mother packed for him close to his chest.

The cold faded, but the pain in his wrist didn't.

Luke strode after him and said, “Your parents just want what's best for you, Ben. You have to remember that.”

What he remembered was this: waves of fear twisting the air around his mother, the door slamming behind his father, Luke touching him even though he knew it hurt. They all knew it hurt, but they didn't care.

 

They didn't visit. They said they would, but they didn't. For the first year, he waited, always expectant, looking up eagerly every time Luke looked like he had something to say. But there was nothing; not even a call or a letter.

He was abandoned and alone.

The other children were scared of him, and they weren't very good at hiding it. The fear clouded everything up, like mud in the water, choking and heavy. They thought he was creepy. They didn't like how he trembled all the time, or how pale he was, or how he had trouble hearing them sometimes. They didn't like how he slipped out of reality and screamed. They didn't like anything about him, really.

He didn't like frightening people, so he kept his distance, didn't try to talk to them or spend time with them, even though the children weren't as difficult to be around as adults were and that was a relief. They were quiet and soft, most of them too young and too ordinary to have experienced anything that hurt much. Not all of them, of course-- one boy's village destroyed, his parents gunned down in front of him, for example-- but there was nothing as bad as Alderaan. The taste of smoke in his mouth rarely went away anyway, the sound of blaster fire and screaming something he'd learned years ago to just tune out.

They were easy, but they didn't want him, so he left them be. He told himself it didn't matter if they didn't like him. Nobody liked him, so what did it matter? He comforted himself with how much better than all of them he was-- more powerful, more advanced, more intelligent. He didn't need to be taught how to meditate, didn't struggle to lift tiny objects. It was easy, which was good because he couldn't learn anything from Luke.

“Focus, Ben,” Luke was always saying, but Ben couldn't focus on him when Darth Vader was looming just behind him. Vader was always there, when Luke got close to him, cold and enormous and frightening. He couldn't look at anything else, terrified of what Vader might do to him.

Usually Luke tried to solve the problem by touching him-- putting his hands on his arm or head-- and then Ben would drop to the cold floor, screaming and writhing as the lightning coursed through his body. (When he woke up screaming _father, please,_ it was always a tangled mess of a slammed door, Vader's gleaming mask, a body burning in a funeral pyre, a retreating back.)

 

Lightsaber practice was always particularly a disaster. His shaking hands could barely hold the practice sticks Luke gave them, and it was easy for the other children to smack the stick out of his hands. It frustrated him. He was better than them at everything else, but terrible at this one thing. This was something he had to actually learn, but he couldn't learn from Luke and he couldn't stop shaking. He picked up the stick again, just for it to get hit right out of his hands again. Over and over again. The other kids got better, and he stayed the same.

The frustration built-- frustration with himself, but of course no one else knew that. The fourth time Gira smacked the stick out of his hands, the air around him crackled. He scowled at the ground and clenched his hands into fists, sick of losing and not improving. It wasn't _fair._ Gira's stick flew out of her hands and across the training field, and Luke called, “Ben!”

“I'm sorry,” he mumbled, turning to fetch the stick, but it was too late already. Luke was striding over to him, looking determined. As he walked, Luke waved his hand and the stick came to him in an instant.

He handed it back to Gira and said, “Ben, let's talk.”

The familiar chill crawled up his spine. Ben glanced at Luke, then recoiled-- Vader was there, as always, enormous and cold and staring. “I don't want to,” He stared at the ground instead, so he didn't have to look at anyone's face, rubbing his wrist where he could feel the blade of the lightsaber cutting through skin and bone like butter. Around him he felt the ripples of nerves as the other children paused to look, worried now that Luke had stopped everything. Luke stepped closer to him and Ben cringed. The lightning was excruciating, and made it difficult to breathe, and snow burned at his exposed skin. He took a step back and clutched his cloak around him to try to stave off the cold. “I _said_ I'm sorry!”

“You're not in trouble,” Luke said soothingly.

“Anakin, I love you,” Padme said.

But if he wasn't in trouble, why would he punish him? If he wasn't in trouble, why force him to feel this pain? If she loved him, how could she do this? When he said, “ _Liar,_ ” it came out as a hoarse snarl, not quite his own voice, an echo of an echo.

Luke inhaled sharply, but didn't quite flinch. Only because he was making an active effort; Ben could feel the crackle of distress under the surface. The pain made him dizzy; he stared harder at the blurry ground, flexing the fingers on his hand to remind himself it was still attached to his arm.

“You have to learn to let go of your frustration. When you get angry, you lose control,” Luke said. His calm soothing voice just made the swirl of nerves more jarring and uncomfortable. Ben hated it when Luke pretended not to be scared of him, like he thought he was stupid or something. Luke smiled encouragingly at him. “Remember to take deep breaths. Remind yourself, _I'll get it, it just takes time._ ”

“I won't get it,” Ben snapped. “I can't do it! I can't even hold a stupid stick!”

“I know it feels like that now, Ben, but I know you can do this,” Luke said. He put his hand on Ben's shoulder and the lightning coursed through his body in earnest, painful and hot, his wrist, his skin exposed to the too-far-below-freezing temperatures, his gunner dead against his back-- he stumbled back, gritting his teeth and breathing hard, eyes darting around anxiously. He had to find landmarks to hold onto to keep himself steady, to stop himself slipping away; his eyes darted between the trees, the temple, the black floors and the red lights.

“I hate this! I want to go home!” Ben's high-pitched anxious voice echoed in the empty room. It was dark and black in here, with no trees and no grass and certainly no temple. It was very cold. He whirled, shoes squeaking on the shiny floor, feeling Vader before he saw him. The feeling was becoming familiar; freezing cold, a dark column of pain and anger and bitter cruelty. Darth Vader stepped towards him, black gloved hand outstretched. Ben stepped back, clutching at his chest and gasping as he struggled to breathe.

“Join me,” Vader said, “And we can rule the galaxy as father and son.”

He turned and ran, hands pressed over his ears to block out the sound of Vader's breathing.

 

“I felt something,” was the first thing Leia said when he answered the call. She looked in quite a state, her hair a mess, wearing the loose tunic she always wore to sleep. She rubbed her eyes angrily and added, “I had a dream.”

Luke combed a hand through his hair and prompted, “What was the dream about?”

She stared at him, her mouth a hard line. Impatient and hyperfocused on cutting to the chase, as usual. “Ben, of course. Is he okay? Has something happened?”

“Well, he's Ben,” Luke said. Her frown intensified. “He still has good days and bad days. He's still himself. He drifts away, he cries, he's in pain. What did you feel?”

She hesitated, like she always did-- normally so confident, but always uncertain when it came to the Force. “The Dark Side,” she said. “A sort of... tug, I suppose. I can't really explain it, I just-- I could feel Ben, and I could feel something _cold._ Do you know what I'm talking about? Have you felt anything like that?”

“Leia, I promise you, I haven't. Whatever you felt wasn't Ben,” he said, with full confidence. Ben was gifted with too much compassion; someone with such perfect empathy couldn't possibly turn to the Dark Side. The notion was patently ridiculous. The amount of suffering that child had felt, he would never turn to causing it himself.

Anyway, Luke would feel it if there was something dark in him. But little Ben, with his pale shaking hands and wide terrified eyes-- he was scared of something, frustrated with himself, angry with his parents, but he was hardly dangerous. The light in him was almost blinding it was so bright, his potential for kindness infinite. All Luke could see was a future Ben who was gentle and soft, smiling easily and easing suffering wherever he went, a Jedi Master like the universe hadn't seen for decades.

“Take care of him,” Leia said, brow creased with worry.

“You should talk to him,” Luke told her, like he did every so often. He wouldn't force her to do anything, but he did strongly suggest things.

She shook her head, looking suddenly worn and exhausted and guilty. She looked away. “He doesn't want to talk to me. What could I possibly say to him? It would just make him feel worse.”

 

No matter how hard he concentrated, he only got the bad parts. It was only suffering that he absorbed from other people; he never felt the happy memories, the just-okay memories, the peaceful memories. That was just how it worked. So he'd never thought they could be useful, really-- not until one of his fellow students dislocated his shoulder. He fell out of a tree, hard, and everyone gathered in a murmuring panicked crowd. They didn't want to get in trouble with Luke, but he was hurt very badly and something had to be done.

Ben remembered dislocating his shoulder-- not his, he reminded himself, it wasn't him-- and having to force it back into its socket himself. He knew where it was supposed to go, what it was supposed to feel like. Ben crouched next to the boy and said, confidently, “I can fix it.”

The kid looked at him through his tears, scared of him but desperate to make it stop hurting. “Please,” he said.

Ben hesitated, hands hovering over the boy's shoulder. Fixing it would hurt, and he didn't want to hurt him. He didn't want to give them any real reason to be afraid of him. He just wanted to help. It occurred to him, then: maybe he could make it so it didn't hurt at all. What if instead of just feeling the pain, he took it? He could use the Force on him, like Luke did when he was small.

“I'm going to try something,” he said, voice small and shaky and nervous. If he messed up, that would be bad. So he couldn't mess up.

He put one hand on the boy's head and the other on his shoulder while another student braced against his back. As he popped the shoulder back where it was supposed to be, he concentrated as hard as he could on taking the pain, eyes squeezed shut.

Pain shot through his arm and chest, and the kid felt nothing at all. When Ben opened his eyes, breathing hard and clutching his shoulder, everyone was smiling at him. They were impressed and happy. That had never happened before. For once, the curse did something good. He smiled back at them, through the pain.

They didn't really get hurt very often under Luke's careful supervision, so he didn't get to do it again, but it still felt good, knowing that he could do it if he needed to. He could control some parts of the curse, even if it was only a little bit and only sometimes. More importantly, it felt good that he didn't need Luke to teach him how.

It wasn't long before it occurred to him to experiment with using the curse in other ways. There was really one thing he was really bad at: lightsaber practice. But he could remember being good at using a lightsaber.

The only memories he had of holding a lightsaber without shaking, collapsing, screaming, belonged not to Luke-- confident, popular, emotionally-supported Luke-- but to his grandfather. Vader was never happy, never calm, never not in some kind of pain. Like him.

 

This time, when they hit the stick out of his hand, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath and, for the first time, _intentionally_ sunk into someplace else. Anakin's grip on the lightsaber was solid but tight, leaving imprints on his palms, his shoulders set, his jaw tight. Heat pressed against his skin and stung his eyes, sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

“Ben?” Luke's voice was so sharp and sudden that Ben jumped. His eyes snapped open to see Luke walking quickly over to him, looking alarmed, and panic twisted in his chest. But his hands didn't shake. He kept his grip on the stick, the worn familiar grip of his lightsaber, and he felt more still than he ever had before.

“Ben, what did you just do?” Fear filled the air, uninhibited and oppressive and choking, as Luke knelt in front of him. Luke was afraid. Afraid of him. Like his mother was. Ben clutched the stick to his chest and took a step back.

“I just,” He didn't know how to explain, how to make him stop being afraid. He knew if he told Luke what he'd done, Luke would only get more afraid, and he wouldn't understand. Ben didn't know how to describe it in a way that didn't sound bad. “I just wanted to practice for real, like everybody else.”

“Ben, you must never choose the quick and easy path over doing what is right,” Luke said. “The Dark Side preys on impatience. Whatever you just did, you mustn't do it again. Not ever.”

Behind him, Anakin paced angrily, combing his hands through his hair. “He's holding me back!”

The heat rising off the lava hurt his eyes. Obi-Wan was always jealous of him. He was more powerful, he was _special,_ and Obi-Wan resented him for it. Ben said, “But I fixed it. I made my hands stop shaking.” He held up the stick, showing Luke how his hands weren't shaking at all, and Luke just kept staring at him.

“What did you do?” he asked again, more urgently this time, but Ben didn't understand why he wasn't happy for him. He figured out how to make the pain useful, how to make it so he could be a real Jedi. Luke could never stop his hands shaking. Nothing Luke taught him helped him to stop trembling, and Ben had finally figured something out on his own, and now he was getting in trouble for it.

“It's not fair!” Anakin snarled behind him, a column of boiling heat at his back. “ _It's not fair!_ He's _jealous!_ ”

Resentment and anger too deep and too poisonous to be really his own twisted in his stomach. He scowled up at Luke and said, “If you don't even know what I did, how come I can't do it again?”

“I could feel the Dark Side when you did it, and I don't want you to get hurt,” Luke said, but he was obviously more worried about other people getting hurt. Since when did Luke care about Ben being hurt? Since _never._ The burning in his wrist proved that. Luke thought he was going to hurt someone, even though Ben hadn't hurt anyone, even though he didn't want to hurt anyone.

Ben's eyes drifted up to Darth Vader, standing behind Luke like he always did. His outstretched, perfectly still, hand.

 

When Luke brought more students, the pain became unbearable again. They came from all over the place-- refugees, escaped slaves, stormtroopers-in-training lost in space. They were in pain and scared and while previously the taste of blood in his mouth had become intermittent and distant, it was back and constant again.

Abandoned again. His parents didn't want him, and now neither did Luke. Luke wanted other students, better students, students who didn't scare him. They were all scared of him, even though he never did anything wrong. He could feel a prickle of anxiety in Luke every time he looked at him, and he hated it.

Ben knew Vader, and he knew he wasn't like him. But they thought he was. He knew that now-- he knew that was what they were afraid of. Anakin's fits of anger, smashing things against the wall, screaming. They all thought he was going to grow up exactly like him, because they thought Ben was angry like Anakin. It all looked the same, to them; pain and frustration and fury.

Anakin paced in his room sometimes, replacing Vader's looming shadow. He punched the walls and flung Ben's books on the floor and snarled, over and over again, “He's _jealous_ , he's holding me back!”

It was impossible for Ben to get any reading done before bed. Anakin was loud and angry and disruptive. He went away when Ben took the sedatives he needed to sleep, but those put him to sleep. There was nothing for him to take while he was awake. “I'm not like you,” he told Anakin.

Anakin didn't hear him; he screamed angrily and flung all of Ben's things off his desk and shouted, again, “He's jealous! He's holding me back!”

Ben sighed and stood up, leaving his book on the bed. He picked up all his things and put them back on his desk, while Anakin kept pacing furiously around the room. His boots slammed against the cool stone floor, loud and sharp, and Ben sometimes wondered if Luke could hear him, too.

“Uncle Luke isn't jealous,” he said, as he set his last book back on the shelf-- alien alphabets, all kinds, most of them he'd only sort of half-learned. It didn't help much to talk to the phantoms, but it made him feel better sometimes. “It's not the same at all.”

Anakin, behind him, stopped pacing, and when Ben turned it was a different Anakin. The pacing Anakin was tall and lanky, with kind of long hair and a weird bright look in his eyes, in his dark Jedi robes with a lightsaber at his hip. This one was the same height as Ben, with pale blond hair and a round face. The small Anakin rubbed his fingertips together, staring at his hand. “It's in the blood,” he said.

“I told you, I'm _different,_ ” Ben snapped, and shoved at the phantom with the Force as hard as he could. It vanished, but it made about as much difference as covering his eyes and ears. Anakin was in his head, not his room. The Council didn't want him because they saw Vader in him, and the unfairness of it all made tears well in his eyes.

He stared at the door to his room, his real room, and fidgeted with the edge of his cloak. He wondered if the Council would have seen Vader in him, too. If they would have said _no_ to him. Would they see the ghost that followed him around and tell him that was his fault?

Pain burned through his wrist and anxiety hummed outside his door; Uncle Luke. “Hey, Ben?” He rapped on the door with his metal knuckles, and Ben hesitated. He considered pretending to be asleep-- “I know you're awake in there.”

“Come in, Uncle Luke,” he muttered, rubbing his wrist. He flexed his fingers, which were still flesh and blood and attached to his body, and tossed himself down on his bed.

Luke came in, ducking his head to get through the doorway, and sat down on the bed opposite Ben's, the one no one slept in because he couldn't be that close to another person. “Hey,” Luke said. His eyes flicked around the room, and his eyebrows wrinkled when he took in the lack of mess. “Everything okay, buddy?”

Ben shrugged and fidgeted, staring at the floor. “Yeah.”

“I can sense a conflict in you,” Luke said. “Do you want to talk?”

He thought about telling him, then. About Darth Vader always following him around, about Anakin yelling at him while he tried to do his homework, about how frustrated and upset he was that everyone was so scared of him. But the anxiety coiling behind Luke's fake calm exterior reminded him that it didn't really matter what he said. They would never understand-- none of them would ever understand.

“No,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Luke sighed and rubbed his neck and said, “I'm not going to be angry with you, Ben, if that's what you're worried about. I just want to know what's going on with you lately. I know there's something going on, and I want to help you.”

Ben just shrugged, and stared at the floor until Luke gave up and left.

 

Meditation helped, a little bit, but he couldn't meditate in the same room as the others any more. It would be fine-- a clear empty room, quiet and still-- but it only took one wandering mind to drag him into a burning house or a crashing spaceship or a slave auction block. Soon he was doing everything by himself; when he slipped away during lessons, he came back to a room vibrating with fear, and the fear was exhausting.

He started taking long walks by himself-- he walked as far as he could in a random direction every day, just to have something to do. Nobody ever stopped him or asked him where he was going. He could never get far enough away for quiet, but any distance made a difference. If he walked far enough he could get away from Darth Vader, and that made the effort worth it. (Walking long distances was hard, with so much of his body aching with pain, with how difficult it was to breathe.)

He found the other temple on one of his walks. It was nestled in the shadowy forest, not connected to any sort of path. It was smaller than Luke's temple, and made of rough grey stone, and it felt much weirder than Luke's temple.

When Ben walked close to it, it felt cold. The closer he got, the colder he felt, the feeling seeping through his skin and into his bones. He stopped in his tracks, squinting at the temple and shivering. It was cold in the same way Darth Vader was cold-- a deep unsettling cold, one that felt frightening. Like looking into a bottomless pit.

This was real, though. Darth Vader was a shadow, a phantom-- as far as he could tell, this temple was real. It wasn't familiar to him, anyway. He'd never seen it or felt it before. That made him curious, and curiosity spurred him forward. He hugged his chest and put up the hood of his cloak and crept toward the temple.

The temple was empty. Every room was just empty, full of dust and moss and sometimes broken pieces of things. If there ever was anything there, it had been removed ages ago. All that was left were the strange carvings that covered all the walls; Ben assumed it was writing, but it wasn't in any language he recognized. He trailed his fingers over the carvings as he walked, fascinated by these things that were so foreign to him.

The hallways were maze-like and convoluted; he knew he'd probably get lost if he took too many turns, so he hugged the left wall and just followed it forward. Even though he wasn't going very far, as he went deeper into the temple the background noise in his head-- soft screams, explosions, flames crackling-- got quieter. And then, when he slid sideways through a half-closed door that wouldn't budge and stumbled into a large round room, something entirely new happened:

Everything went quiet, silent as the grave, and all his pain disappeared. All at once, like a switch was flipped; very suddenly, it was just gone.

He gasped at the sudden emptiness, inhaling clean damp air. There was nothing. Not an echo, not a whisper; just cold silence. No blood in his mouth, no smoke. Ben staggered, disoriented by how suddenly and impossibly light his body felt. For a moment, it felt fragile, impermanent-- but it didn't go away. A delighted laugh bubbled up in his throat as he stared at his unshaking hands.

He stood up straight and spun around, grinning broadly with his arms stretched as far out as they could go. Nothing hurt; there was just a peculiar prickle crawling over his skin, a faint tingling in his veins. He felt better than he had ever felt in his entire life, like he could do absolutely anything. The Force was _there_ , at his fingertips, present and tangible, without any echoes or shadows.

Ben flipped across the room, spinning easily in the air and landing on the palms of his hands. He'd never been able to do any of the acrobatics that the other students were learning; everything hurt too much. He grinned broadly and did it again.

For the first time, he felt purely happy. There was nothing else to bother him, nothing obstructing his vision or his hearing. His own laughter felt loud and crystal clear, not filtered through hundreds of other voices. The stone felt so real under his fingertips-- damp and cold and rough, solid and present.

When he tired himself out (which didn't take long) he stood, breathless, and actually looked around the room. Not that there was much to look at. Mossy curling plants climbing up the walls and poking through the floor, a strange pedestal standing in the middle of the room, and a box pressed up against the wall on the far side. The box had plants growing over it, so he hadn't noticed it; it blended into the shadows perfectly. That was all.

Ben reached towards the box and laughed again-- he could feel the texture of the damp-damaged wood and the cold rusty metal and the rough stone of the wall easily, without even trying. It was all the way across the room, but he could feel it like he was really touching it. Without the pain distracting him, he could do _anything._ He pulled his hand towards him and the box shot across the floor and slammed into his foot.

He crouched and tugged the box open, curiosity and excitement throwing caution to the wind. He'd never felt anything like this before, and there wasn't anything else in the temple that would help explain what this place was and why it was so _perfect._ The box's hinges screeched as he forced it open; it hadn't been opened in a very long time.

Inside was just one thing: a lightsaber. It wasn't anything like Luke's, but it had all the same pieces as his lightsaber. The handle was worn and black, with small pieces jutting out on the top like wings.

Luke said that Jedi never touched another Jedi's lightsaber, not unless they had permission. “Your lightsaber is a part of you, like another limb,” he said.

But this lightsaber was abandoned. Like him. If it belonged to anyone, it belonged to him. It called to him, drawing him to it like a magnet. It felt like a missing part of him.

His ears starting ringing, and that was immediately followed by an intense desire to pick up the lightsaber. He wanted to hold it, to see how it felt in his hands-- his own hands, steady and pain-free, not Anakin's hands.

Afterward, he would bring it to Luke, of course. Luke would hold onto it until he was ready, and give it to him when he was older, because this lightsaber was _his._ It was meant to be his; this felt like an indisputable fact, as certain as the stone under his feet.

When he wrapped his fingers around the cold metal, all the air was ripped out of his lungs and a sudden rush of input flooded his senses. It all happened at once: someone shouted his name and it echoed. A girl shrieked. Twigs snapped. Wrists twisted in their restraints. A black mask hit the floor hard. Cold bit at his skin. Red light cast an eerie glow over the snow. Sharp pain slashed at his face, along with the loud hum of a lightsaber; he yelped and scrambled back, dropping the lightsaber on the ground with a clatter as his hands flew to his face.

As the noise and light faded, he heard a whisper hiss through the quiet room.

“These are your first steps, Ben.”

He looked around, gasping for breath, but there was no one there. The room was the same as before, quiet and empty. The lightsaber did that, somehow. He stared down at it, then slowly, hesitantly, picked it up again. This time, there was nothing. He turned it over in his hand, but there were no marking of any kind that might explain what happened.

He stood, fully intending to tuck it into his belt and take it to Uncle Luke at once, but he hesitated. He was still curious. And he wouldn't get another chance to use it, probably _ever,_ now that it had done that weird thing. He moved his thumb over the handle until he found the little activation switch and pressed it.

The handle started vibrating as the blade buzzed to life, and the crossguard-- both bright red and very warm. He could feel the heat of the crossguard on his hand. He smiled, even though the light stung his eyes, and tentatively swung it through the air. Red like Anakin's. Like his grandfather. It really was meant to be his.

“Well, well,” said a crackling buzzing voice.

He jumped and nearly dropped the lightsaber again. The pedestal in the center of the room had a small flickering hologram above it, but it was shapeless and broken. It didn't really look like a person as much as a stack of broken plates, flickering and blurry. “Hello?” He peered at it and took a step forward. “Is someone there?”

“Another Skywalker,” said the voice. Ben squinted; the hologram almost looked like a face, but not quite. It kept flickering and buzzing, and he couldn't figure out which side was the front. He walked slowly around it in a circle, lightsaber momentarily forgotten.

“Skywalker's my uncle,” he said. “Who're you?”

The voice chuckled, he thought, but it could have just been the hologram malfunctioning. “A Jedi, like your uncle,” the voice said.

He could always taste a lie-- sour and bitter on his tongue, like rust. He wrinkled his nose and said, “All the Jedi are dead.” He kept pacing around the pedestal, squinting at the broken picture. Everyone knew the Jedi were all dead, all of them except Luke-- his mouth tugged into a smile, because he'd never had that thought without an accompanying surge of pain before.

“Not my kind of Jedi.”

He tightened his grip on the lightsaber as his shoulders tensed. He wasn't stupid enough to think this wasn't weird. There were only two kinds of Jedi; good ones and bad ones. All the good ones were dead, and he thought the bad ones were, too, but... “I should go,” he said, turning to the door and putting away the lightsaber.

“Eager to get back to the pain, are we?”

He stopped. Turned. “How do you know about that?”

The voice didn't explain. Instead, it said, “I could teach you how to make it stop.”

How could he leave, after that? He had to at least see if it was true, first. He fiddled with his cloak and shuffled back towards the pedestal. It was about as tall as him, solid pockmarked stone. “Could you really?”

“I could,” said the voice. “I like to teach. I could train you with the lightsaber, too, if you want me to.”

“Yeah!” Ben beamed at the hologram. He couldn't think of a single reason why he would say no. It wasn't like a hologram could be dangerous, and even if it were dangerous Ben was more powerful in this room than he'd ever been in his life.

 

Ben left the lightsaber in its box when he left. If he took it to Luke, Luke would just take it away, and he'd never be any good with a lightsaber. But if he could practice with it in the temple, he could get really good-- he _knew_ he could get really good-- and then he could be the best at _everything_ and no one would get hurt and Luke would have to admit he was wrong.

When he got back the temple, everything was the same as ever; the pain, the shortness of breath, the screaming. But it wasn't so bad, now that he knew there was a way to make it stop. It was only temporary, now. Soon he would learn how to get rid of it forever, and then he could be a great Jedi. He would be a great Jedi, like Anakin never got to be, and maybe then the ghosts would leave him alone.

“Ben!” Luke shouted, as soon as Ben touched the doorknob to his bedroom. The fear clouding the air around him was especially bad, worse than usual; Ben turned, shrinking into himself, and mumbled an apology even though he didn't know what he'd done wrong this time.

Luke yanked him into a smothering hug, sending white-hot pain shooting through his chest and shoulders and arms. Ben's pained noise was muffled by Luke's chest. “Ben, thank the Maker, you're okay!”

“Uncle Luke,” Ben croaked feebly. His voice was barely audible over the screaming. His house lay in ruins in front of him, just more rubble in the desert, his aunt and uncle dead in the sand. Luke ruffled his hair, and Ben's entire body convulsed as the lightning coursed through him. He bit back a sob and choked out, as fast as he could, “Uncle Luke, this really really hurts.”

“I'm sorry,” Luke let him go and Ben wheezed in a breath, wiping at his eyes. “I'm sorry, I was just-- I was worried.”

Luke stared at him, eyes flicking over him, eyebrows wrinkled. The fear gave way to something else, something he couldn't quite identify, and Luke brushed hair out of Ben's face. The flash of lightning was brief, but still enough to make him flinch. “Ben, where did you _go?_ ” Luke asked. “You vanished-- you were there one second, on your walk, and then there was just nothing, and then--” He stopped himself, chewing on his lower lip and shaking his head.

His whole family, gone while he was just out-- he wasn't gone for that long, but long enough for the troopers to find the house, to burn it down and kill everyone inside. Just like that, he didn't have a family. Ben glanced away, staring at the floor instead of Luke's face. “I was just exploring,” he mumbled.

“Where? Did you find anything?” Luke persisted, staring him down with his wide icy-blue eyes, and Ben shrank back again, struggling to breathe. “Ben, did you pick anything up? Did you go anywhere in particular?”

If he told Luke, he knew Luke would tell him to never go there again, and he would take away the lightsaber. Then Ben would never be any good. Luke was never going to teach him how to make the pain go away. Ben _had_ to keep it a secret. He stared at the floor and said, “No.”

 

Luke couldn't sense it.

Ben's daily disappearances he put down to some strange effect of the Sith temple, probably some old security device. Ben always came back, and he was never much different. He was more cheerful, and that seemed like only a good thing.

He came home from his walks with burns on his hands sometimes, but he wouldn't explain where he got them. “An accident,” he'd mumble, and shuffle away as quickly as he could.

Ben grew taller and colder. He spoke rarely, kept to himself even as he stopped flinching and crying and screaming in the middle of lessons. Nothing replaced the anxious jittery energy; instead, Ben alternated between eerie empty stillness and his violent screaming fits, smashing up his room in the middle of the night, screaming at nothing, punching the walls and flinging his things onto the floor. Those got worse as Ben got better, and Ben wouldn't talk to him about it.

There wasn't much he could glean from listening in. He could only hear one half of what was apparently an extremely upsetting conversation: “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, _shut up!_ It's not like that! It's _not!_ ”

He tried, once, to reach out and see what Ben saw; Ben gave him a look, eyes dark and expressionless, and it felt like a door being slammed in his face. He couldn't feel anything. Ben shut him out so thoroughly he thought for a second he had to have been trained-- but who could have done that? He must have learned it on his own.

The shadows under Ben's eyes grew darker, bruises pressed into his pale skin. He improved dramatically in lightsaber practice as his hands stopped shaking. He was fast, and strong, and when Luke watched him move he couldn't help feeling-- _knowing--_ that Ben was going to be great, just like his namesake.

 

Leia pressed her hand over her mouth, staring intently at the video Luke had sent. It wasn't good. Luke seemed excited-- delighted, even-- at Ben's progress, and Leia couldn't help feeling they were looking at two different things.

Ben's dark cloak was still big on him, trailing against the ground. His face was still and expressionless. His eyes were focused, intense, not glassy and distant like they had been as a child, but it didn't feel like an improvement. Those eyes, combined with the way he prowled around the training field, made him look like a predator circling its prey. He was tall, now, and wiry; an ominous dark column, too familiar by far.

He moved quickly and easily, a swirl of elegant footwork, and that's what Luke seemed so taken with, but what Leia saw was how Ben kicked the other student to the ground and pinned him there with his boot, stick pointed at his throat. The other student was in pain, but Ben was smiling down at him like he couldn't feel a thing.

“Luke,” she said, unmuting her communication line. “Something's wrong.”

The video flickered, then replayed again. Luke clicked his tongue. “Aren't you glad he's improved so much? Two years ago he could barely hold a stick, and now he's the best out of all of them.”

“I feel like there's something here you're choosing not to see,” Leia felt awful, saying that about her own son, but she knew she was right. She knew Luke was missing something. She stared at the replay, watching the flurry of movement on the edge of the screen. “Look how the other students are moving. It's completely different. Did you teach him differently?”

Luke paused. “Well, no.”

“So someone else must have,” she said, and Luke was silent for a while. The silence was all she needed to know; he didn't know who else had been teaching her son to fight. Who else could have? He said he was the only teacher there, and there weren't any towns nearby.

“Luke,” she said, but he cut her off.

“Leia, it's-- I know it looks bad, but I promise you, I've _seen_ Ben's future. He's going to be brilliant, I know he is. I know you're worried, but--” He huffed out a frustrated sigh. “I've seen it, Leia, and I've never been so sure about a vision like this before. It can't be anything sinister.”

In the video, she watched again as her son dropped down and swept his foot out, kicking the other student's feet out from under him. “I trust you,” she said, reluctantly.

 

It was all going so well, until it wasn't.

Ben was getting better and better at closing himself off; he still had to actively concentrate, but it was starting to become second nature. It wasn't that hard, after a while; he had always needed to push it aside to some extent. Without the pain and the distractions, he flourished. His lightsaber was like a part of his arm, now, even despite the unpleasant buzzing and the fact that the handle got hot enough to burn him if he used it for too long.

He learned to become cold. To cut himself off from everyone around him. He trained himself not to care, the way people didn't care about him. To be compassionate was to be vulnerable. His desire to be understood and accepted was his weakness; he knew that, now. When he forced himself to stop subconsciously reaching out, to stop trying to connect with people, his pain level dropped considerably.

What purpose was there in feeling the pain of someone who hated you? Why bother trying to understand someone who was never going to do the same for you? What he needed was self-confidence. He needed to be able to depend on himself, because there wasn't anyone else who he could depend on. Not his parents, not Luke, not the other students. Other people, quite literally, made him weak. Alone, he was stronger. Alone, he was in control.

As if to punish him, as soon as his concentration slipped it all crashed down on him at once, louder and more painful than ever before. The sedatives he took before bed stopped making a difference, and he woke up screaming in pain every night. Snoke-- the voice from the hologram was named Snoke-- said that everything had a price. Everything must be in balance. If he did not feel the pain during the day, it was to be expected that he had to feel it some other time.

But it was all worth it, because he was finally the best. Indisputably, Ben was the best student Luke had. He was more powerful, he was faster, he knew how to fight better, he could do more with the Force than they could even imagine.

The day after he finally beat every single other student there in a sparring match was the day he decided he was going to show Luke his lightsaber. Snoke said Luke would take it away from him, but Ben didn't think so. Now that he was the best, Luke had to see that Ben was right. He was going to follow in Anakin's footsteps and do what Anakin couldn't. He was going to bring balance to the Force. It would be him. Being the best was the first half; when Luke saw that Ben's lightsaber was red, like Anakin's, he would understand that this was preordained. He had to. How could he not?

Sixteen years old and he still felt nervous at the idea of telling his uncle the truth. He fiddled with his lightsaber the whole walk back to the temple, tossing it up in the air and catching it again, twirling it around his fingers.

Darth Vader walked beside him, cape billowing behind him, and Ben stared straight ahead. It was best to just pretend he wasn't there, no matter how frightened of him he was. Vader said nothing, just walked beside him, breathing ragged.

 

He had a whole speech planned, had rehearsed it over and over while Snoke patiently listened, but Luke cut him off before he could start. When Ben stood in his room and inhaled, Luke pointed at the lightsaber and asked, sharply, “Where did you get that?”

“That's what I came to talk to you about,” Ben said. The look Luke gave him was wary-- Luke was always wary and on edge when Ben was around. Ben cleared his throat and straightened up and mustered all the confidence he could manage. “It's-- it's proof that I'm supposed to carry on Grandfather's legacy. He couldn't bring balance to the Force, but I can.”

Luke tensed. Ben soldiered on, gripping the lightsaber tight for reassurance. The familiar grooves and texture comforted him, the weight of it steady and constant. “I've been training really hard so I could be the best, so you would know that I can be just as strong as him,” he said. “I'm the strongest here-- and, and I know it's not just about strength, but I found this-- it _called_ to me, so I know it was meant to be mine, and _this_ proves that it's fate.”

The words tumbled out of his mouth, not nearly as grand and amazing as he'd planned. He was too excited, talking too fast. “See?” he said, as he activated the lightsaber, smiling wide.

Luke stared at it. He didn't return his smile. Instead, he leaned heavily against his desk and whispered, “What have you done?”

That was as far from what he'd expected as possible. Ben frowned and deactivated the lightsaber. “What--”

“ _Who_ trained you?” Luke straightened, and the look he gave him was harder and colder than anything Ben had ever seen on his face before. He stepped back, suddenly anxious. This wasn't how it was supposed to go at all. Luke was _angry_ , angry with him, drawing himself up taller than he'd ever seen him.

“That-- that doesn't matter, that's not important,” He laughed nervously and fumbled for a better explanation, clutching his lightsaber to his chest. “It's red, like Grandfather's-- don't you see, Uncle Luke, _that's_ why I'm like this, that's why I was _born_ , I'm supposed to take on his destiny and I can do it-- I _know_ I can do it--”

“No. No, this is all wrong,” Luke mumbled, combing his hands through his hair. He stared desperately at Ben, his face a mess of anger and betrayal and fear. That stung, even with his guard up. “What have you done, Ben? Where did you get that lightsaber?”

“I told you, I just found it,” He clenched his free hand into a fist, digging his nails into his palm, frustration burning under his skin. “You're not listening to me. Why aren't you listening to me? I didn't do anything _wrong!_ ”

“You've turned to the Dark Side!” Luke snapped back, and it felt like such a slap in the face that Ben had to step back, off-balance.

“How could you say that?” His voice was barely above a whisper, weak and hurt, and even to him it sounded pathetic. Hurt warped quickly into betrayal, into frustration-- how could Luke trust him so little? How could that be his first thought? “Everything I've done, I did so I could be a Jedi! Like you wanted!”

“How could I not see it?” Luke looked away, staring instead at the wall. “You cut yourself off, you pushed away your gift-- Ben, who taught you to do that?”

Viscerally repulsed, he spat, “My _gift?_ How could you call it that? You know how much it hurt me-- that _gift_ was a _curse,_ a _punishment_ for Vader's mistakes! I couldn't be a Jedi like that!”

Beside him, Anakin bared his teeth in a snarl, eyes darkening. “He's holding me back,” he growled, anger radiating off of him like the heat off the lava.

“Shut up!” Pain lanced through his head as he waved away the phantom; he clutched his head with his free hand. His control was slipping rapidly, the pain returning, first in his head and then in his wrist and then everywhere else. He raised his voice to a shout as the screaming came back all at once. “You said yourself how much I've improved since I learned how to make the pain go away, you _saw_ how good I can be-- Uncle Luke, you _know_ I can do this! I could be the man he couldn't be! I could finish what he started!”

“No,” Luke said urgently. He, too, was clutching his head, eyes wide. “No, Ben, you _can't_ carry on down this path. You must embrace the gift of compassion, you must learn to live with it, to work with it, to use it for good--”

“You _want_ me to be in pain?” He couldn't breathe. Everything hurt. His heels dug into the dirt, slipping in the sand. Every wound in his body was poisoned with betrayal, with hurt, with _anger_ boiling up through his veins. He gestured sharply-- all the books flew off Luke's shelves-- and stuttered even as he kept shouting. “That's not-- that's not _right,_ that's not my destiny! I'm going to be _great_ and _powerful!_ I'm going to be the one to bring balance to the Force!”

Now Luke was holding up his hands, pacifying, desperate, horrified. He kept his voice low, even though the air in the room was choked with fear. “The quick and easy path is rarely the right one, Ben, you can't take shortcuts-- I know it's hard, but it's through hardship that the greatest Jedi are created, it will give you strength and compassion that no one else--”

“You _saw_ what it did to me! It didn't make me strong!” His throat burned, ragged from screaming, burning in the heat. Everything was falling apart around him. A loud and terrible wind howled through the room, flinging loose objects in every direction, smashing anything breakable. Tears stung his eyes and blurred his vision; he blinked them away furiously. “It made me _weak,_ I was just a useless terrified little kid! Now I can fulfill my potential! Why can't you _see?_ ”

With the pain he could barely see, could barely move. The stone floor under his feet cracked, gave way, and he screamed, engulfed in flames, blind with pain.

“Ben, please,” Luke almost gasped, staring at him but not quite at him, reaching out a hand. He said something Ben couldn't hear-- inaudible over the screaming and the wind, but he caught the tail end of it when Luke raised his voice to a shout: “Turn back now, Ben, before it's too late!”

“I won't abandon all the progress I've made! I _won't_ go back to this! I _can't!_ ”

The pain was too much, too horrible, and Luke couldn't possibly begin to understand. Ben turned and ran, bleeding and choking and broken, and he didn't stop until he'd slammed into the Inner Sanctum of his temple and collapsed on the floor, gasping for air and sobbing.

As his mind cleared of the pain and the fog, he kept crying, curling in on himself and gripping his wrist hard where he could still feel a phantom pain where it got cut off.

“Oh, Ben,” Snoke sighed. “I did warn you, didn't I?”

Ben buried his face in his arms. “I thought he'd listen to me!” he wailed, voice ragged. It hurt to talk, it hurt to cry-- for the first time, he wasn't free of pain in the temple, and that terrified him. His chest ached terribly. “He said I should be in pain!”

“Your uncle fears your power, and seeks to limit it any way he can,” Snoke said. “He wants to keep you weak, so that if you ever fight against him he could easily kill you.”

He _knew,_ then, that that was true. The fear surrounding Luke, the terrible look in his eyes. Luke didn't care about him. He didn't trust him. He never had. He was always waiting for any excuse to declare Ben _evil_ , so everyone could finally be rid of him-- all of them, terrified of him even though he'd never done anything wrong, even though he'd tried so hard.

The pain twisted into anger, sudden and bitter. It itched at his skin, flooded his veins with a heat he didn't know what to do with. Luke abandoned him years ago. Luke wanted him frail and weak and miserable. All those times Luke put his hands on Ben's shoulders, pretending to care when really all he wanted to do was make sure Ben never forgot that he was being punished. Punished for things he'd never done. Of course it wasn't an accident. Luke had been hurting him on purpose all this time.

“I hate him,” Ben spat.

“Good. Hate can be useful to you,” Snoke said. “He doesn't deserve anything more from you than your hatred. He doesn't love you, Ben. And he certainly doesn't believe you'll ever be able to fulfill your destiny.”

He sat up, though he felt extremely heavy, and stared down at his hands. “But you do.”

“Of course I do.”

 

“Luke is unfit to train Jedi. These children will cause nothing but trouble, only imbalance the Force, throw the natural order into chaos. Kill them all. It is the only way.”

 _It is the only way_ , Ben repeated to himself, over and over again. They hated him. They were disgusted and frightened by him. They could never be real Jedi, not one of them. They didn't deserve Luke's attention-- they didn't try as hard as he did, they weren't his family, and yet Luke cared more about any one of them than he'd ever cared about Ben. If any of them were anything close to being real Jedi-- if any of them were anything but useless disturbances in the Force-- they would be able to fight him off. They would feel him coming.

He'd spent years building himself careful layers of restraint. All his life, he'd tried very hard to not get angry, to only take out his frustration on inanimate objects. Now, he let go, for the first time. Betrayal, pain, bitterness, frustration, the unfairness of it all: it all translated easily into anger. He wrapped himself in anger and felt power surge through him like he'd never felt before, burning out the pain and leaving only the screaming.

With every person he killed, the screaming in his head grew quieter. With each voice silenced, he felt his grasp of the Force grow stronger. The flashes of pain and terror that came in the moments before they died were insignificant; they barely registered to him, protected as he was by his shield of anger.

When they were all dead, Ben felt more clearheaded than he ever had in his life. It was blissfully quiet; just him and Luke left for miles and miles. Anakin burned at his side, teeth bared, eyes bright yellow.

As he walked, a vision came to him; not the past, but the future, a more clear glimpse of it than he'd ever had before.

There would be a girl. Small but fast. A white-knuckled grip on Luke's lightsaber, a lightsaber that she had no right to wield that she wielded nonetheless. A girl, piloting the _Falcon_ with his father, his eyes on her soft and approving and fond. A girl, embracing his mother. A girl, training under Luke, his new favorite student.

A replacement. A new child, a new Jedi, better and softer and easier to talk to, with steady hands and clear bright eyes.

He didn't let himself feel that pain. Not any more. He took a deep breath and sunk, deep, into the fury. To be consumed by rage wasn't painful in the slightest; it pushed the pain aside, made it irrelevant. Everything hurt, but he couldn't feel it any more.

The door to Luke's room slammed open, ripped off the wall with barely a thought. Luke was on his knees on the floor; he didn't resist when Ben slammed him hard against the wall, just slumped to the floor, gazing up at him.

“Ben,” he said. “What have you _done?_ ”

“I killed them,” Ben and Anakin said, simultaneously, their voices layering and creating a strange deep cacophanous noise. “I killed them all. Are you happy now?”

“I failed you. I'm so sorry,” Luke said.

Disgust curled his lip and he almost recoiled. _Sorry._ What a joke. A cruel joke, too-- it disgusted him that Luke would even _try_ to lie to him like that. How feeble, how useless, how half-hearted. Apologizing now, after everything. “Liar,” he snarled, Anakin's voice on his tongue. He pointed his lightsaber at Luke's throat, hovering less than an inch from his skin. He stared down at him, hands steady. “You always thought I was going to turn to the Dark Side. You only brought me here to keep other people safe from me. You always thought I was _dangerous._ ”

Luke opened his mouth to say something; Ben's jaw tightened, and Anakin's hand jerked out, and Luke choked on whatever it was he was about to say.

“You were right about me,” Ben hissed. “Tell your sister you were right about me.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol.... chapter 2 more than twice as long as chapter 1............................. oops. ok. hope you enjoyed, b!!! happy EXTREMELY LATE BIRTHDAY!!!


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